RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

I have realized that the Baha’i proscription of clergy is in fact a universal proscription for all religions — confirmed, without my seeing it till now, by practice at Puttaparthi and in Sai Centers worldwide. This is also confirmed by personal experience, wherein it has been impossible to either want or acquire posting as a parochial clergyman in any context.

There are no clergy of any religion and I would guess will not be for a long, long time. This is the meaning of Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase that is translated into English as Religionless Christianity: Christianity/Church without clergy. Really it is only a growing up, coming of age, as Bonhoeffer put it, of the Protestant Principle.

The fairly complete occupation by queers and tyrants of clerical and musical posts across denominations claiming to represent religions is evidence that in this era religions do not have clergy. As I think about when this started it seems to me at least by the 1930s. Certainly by the 1960s there was not a religion on the globe that had clergy, thus explaining my experience at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where I graduated in 1969 and started this birth in 1943, and subsequently.

This has been a comforting revelation to me. It elicits some pang of contentment regarding the legitimacy of struggles of years’ duration with these individuals who would be treated as clergy.

Along with this realization, goes a reassessment of the nature and manner of the Sacraments. I have not seen through that one yet, but I think it is going to be towards the sacramentalizing of all life, something Schweitzer used to mean, as well as other things, by his phrase reverence for life. He obtained that phrase from the Stoics, whose philosophical articulation underlies the New Testament. In any case, a clerically-based or-delivered sacrament is not in existence now. And I am not sure how discrete a sacrament can be in the situation where every act is sacramental ….

Update 1: Honoring COL Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the others.

AMDG – VICTORY